Zero: An Investigation Into 9/11

Thursday 21 August 2008 19.01 EDT
First published on Thursday 21 August 2008 19.01 EDT

If Mr Bush and Mr Blair are still musing over their "legacy", well, here it is - the 9/11 "truth" movement, of which this film, from Italian directors Franco Farcassi and Francesco Trento, is the latest example. It represents a sizeable body of opinion, holding that everything that we were told about that awful day, every syllable, every dot, every comma, every jot, every tittle, was a great big lie. Our rulers brought this fatuous exercise in silly conspiracy theorism on themselves and us, having foisted the definite untruth of WMD on the world. After all, why should we believe anything proclaimed by the governments of Washington and London which endorsed that mendacity?

Silly, however, is certainly what the 9/11 theories are. To recap: this movie, like an earlier essay called Loose Change, promotes the belief not merely that 9/11 was a bogus pretext for war, but that it was a bogus event itself, faked, stage-managed and orchestrated by the powers that be. The twin towers were not brought down by kamikaze terrorists, but demolished by covert military-grade explosives, smuggled into the building, of which molten metal in the ashy ruins is the residual evidence. The crashing planes were a diversionary stunt. The so-called terrorists were CIA-mujahideen stooges, who may or may not have been on board, but in any case were ordered to establish their existence on dozens of security cameras to establish an alibi. The plane that crashed into the Pentagon must have been a missile, because the hole isn't big enough for anything else.

And so on. These theories are rehearsed by Dario Fo, with an insufferably smug grin inappropriate for discussing an event whose casualties he presumably does not dispute, and who is pointedly described as a "Nobel prizewinner" - though his prize is for literature, not engineering.

As it happens, the dissident theories about the towers' downfall have already been extensively answered by engineers at least as qualified as the ones contributing here. Yes, the Towers' designers complain that their buildings should have withstood plane crashes - but then, they would, wouldn't they? They don't want to be blamed. Or sued. Farcassi and Trento don't get into the cui bono aspect of it all, presumably to avoid accusations of sensationalism or conspiracy theorism. But without this kind of reasoning, their film is meaningless. And incidentally, they don't mention the fourth plane, the one that crashed into a field - so does that mean that there were terrorists on that one?

However, daft as it all is, I must now admit something. The film-makers do raise one legitimate question. It concerns WTC-7, the third tower that collapsed that day - still a little-known event - seven hours after the first two, apparently as a result of fire and debris damage. But it had not been struck by a plane. How exactly could that fall down? Well, that too is part of the back-and-forth slanging match between "truthers" and the rest. Perhaps if the Bush government hadn't been so secretive, so belligerent and dishonest, then this sort of loopiness wouldn't have found such fertile soil to grow.